Introducing Solaread
Reading in a second language is mostly not a language problem. It is an interruption problem.
You are three pages into a paper you have to read for Thursday. A word you half-know stops you. You copy it, switch to a translator, paste, read the meaning, switch back, find the line. That is two clicks and a keyboard trip, and it happens thirty times a chapter. Every one of them is a door out of the text. For some of us the door is TikTok, or a game, or a sudden need to reorganize the desk, and the paper does not get read.
Solaread is my attempt to close those doors.
Help that comes to the line
The core idea is simple: the translation should come to you, not the other way around. Solaread looks at each book against an estimate of your vocabulary and glosses only the words you probably do not know. The gloss appears inside the line, either in parentheses right after the word or beneath it, and it is inserted with a small animation that does not shift the paragraph. If the gloss is not enough, you hover it and a short explanation appears in the context of that sentence. Move the mouse away and it is gone.
The estimate comes from a vocabulary test that takes about half a minute: one word at a time, Don't know or Know it. From then on the model keeps learning from what you save and what you mark as known. Over time it translates less, which is the point.
What the first version does
Today Solaread runs in your browser. It reads EPUB, TXT and PDF, syncs your library and notes between devices, and offers Scholar Plus for study: AI translation and PDF processing without limits, plus a notes panel beside the reader. A Chrome extension that sends articles and YouTube transcripts to your bookshelf is in testing, and desktop and mobile apps are on the way.
What is next
The Scholar notes panel is going to get smarter about what you are reading: completion that draws on the paper in front of you, a profile that tells it what kind of writer you are, and notes that carry the book's terms with their glosses and a link back to the page. E-ink devices and podcast import are further out. You can follow all of it on the changelog.
If you have a book you have been putting off because of the lookups, open Solaread and try that one.